slippers, stood up, thrust her arms out and brought the hands down again behind her head, yawned, and then put on a yellow quilted dressing-gown which had been lying across the foot of the bed.
Esther had a rosy, jolly, delicate face of noble beauty. It was small, firm, and almost heart-shaped, and in its mobile features there was a strange union of child and woman. The instant anyone met her for the first time he felt: “This woman must look exactly the way she did when she was a child. She can’t have changed at all.” Yet her face also bore the markings of middle age. It was when she was talking to someone and her whole countenance was lighted by a merry and eager animation that the child’s face was most clearly visible.
When she was at work, her face was likely to have the serious concentration of a mature and expert craftsman engaged in an absorbing and exacting labour, and it was at such time that she looked oldest. It was then that one noticed the somewhat fatigued and minutely wrinkled spaces round her eyes and some strands of grey that were beginning to sprinkle her dark-brown hair.
Similarly, in repose, or when she was alone, her face was likely to have a sombre, brooding depth. Its beauty then was profound and full of mystery. She was three parts a Jewess, and in her contemplative moods the ancient, dark, and sorrowful quality of her race seemed to take complete possession of her. She would wrinkle her brow with a look of perpelexity and grief, and in the cast of her features there would be a fatal quality, as of something priceless that was lost and irrecoverable. This look, which she did not wear often, had always troubled George Webber when he saw it because it suggested some secret knowledge buried deep within the woman whom he loved and whom he believed he had come to know.
But the way she appeared most often, and the way people remembered her best, was as a glowing, jolly, indomitably active and eager little creature in whose delicate face the image of the child peered out with joyfulness and immortal confidence. Then her apple-cheeks would glow with health and freshness, and when she came into a room she
